May. 22, 2015

May. 6, 2015

Sotheby's sells Vincent van Gogh painting L’allee Des Alyscamps for $66.3 million at auction of Impressionist and modern art that brings in total of $368 million. MORE

Jan. 25, 2015

Patricia Albers reviews book Van Gogh: A Power Seething by Julian Bell. MORE

Dec. 10, 2014

Curators of Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam have redesigned and rehung permanent collection to present more nuanced view of artist popularized as emotionally wrought and troubled genius; curators hope to show that van Gogh was not isolated figure painting straight from heart, but rather meticulous, methodical artist. MORE

Oct. 6, 2013

Van Gogh painted numerous copies of his own work, often making refinements with each version; exhibition at Phillips Collection in Washington examines 13 instances of this practice. MORE

Sep. 10, 2013

Van Gogh Museum declares 1888 painting Sunset at Montmajour, which for years had been considered a fake and consigned to an attic, a genuine van Gogh. MORE

Oct. 28, 2012

Denver Art Museum’s exhibit Becoming van Gogh, which will feature 70 works by the master and 20 by other artists, will explore van Gogh’s development through the 1880s from a struggling, inhibited neophyte to a painter in full flourish. MORE

Feb. 3, 2012

Roberta Smith reviews the exhibition Van Gogh Up Close at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. MORE

Nov. 27, 2011

Deborah Solomon reviews book Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. MORE

Oct. 21, 2011

Michiko Kakutani reviews biography Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. MORE

There are no additional abstracts to display.

Highlights from the Archives

You can still picture van Gogh, bookish and fastidious, pouring out his thousands of letters and drawings, private diaries in words and images, sent to his brother and to a few trusted friends, providing him with a stability that he evidently could find nowhere else in life. The Protestant preacher's son, he dutifully recorded his constant labors with pen and paper.

''Old Gauguin and I understand each other at heart, and if we are a bit mad, what of it?'' van Gogh asked. What of it is the gist of the season's presumptive mega-exhibition, ''Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South.''

Van Gogh's ''Portrait of Dr. Gachet'' may not be as famous as ''Starry Night'' or one of his sunflower paintings, but it remains an iconic masterpiece of modernism. The melancholy countenance of van Gogh's doctor stands, in the painter's words, as the ''heartbroken expression of our time.'' It embodies all the angst and longing of the turn-of-the-century world the artist saw around him.

Van Gogh's life has assumed the lineaments of a myth in the popular imagination: he is regarded as the very embodiment of the artist maudit, tortured, impoverished and insane. Two new books should do much to flesh out the man and the painter behind that popular legend.

It was at Arles, the small city in the south of France where he stayed from early in 1888 to the spring of 1889, that van Gogh had his first real bout with madness. Yet Arles was also the scene of an astonishing burst of creativity, in which over the short span of 15 months he produced some 200 paintings and more than 100 drawings and watercolors, a record that perhaps only Picasso has matched in the modern era.